Faith of the Divine Inferno - Leslie Thompson (best short novels of all time TXT) 📗

it a lot, but my family wasn’t too thrilled. My parents and grandparents are devout Baptists, and they pitched an ungodly fit about me having a pagan symbol tattooed into my arm. Every time I visit my grandmother, I get to listen to detailed descriptions of what Satan will do to me when I get to Hell.”
I laughed at that, imagining the clichéd southern granny fiercely harping at her chagrined grandson. “That’s it? You had one wild night with a pretty girl and ended up with a tattoo?”
“Pretty much.”
“Was the girl strange in any way?” I asked thinking. That tattoo made Bres think that another faerie had claimed Shaw. It was the reason why Shaw was sitting in the circle with me instead of lying unconscious on the side of a road somewhere.
“Of course she was odd. That was part of her appeal. Bridget was wild and fun and she loved sex. But she also had a short attention span and the relationship was over a few months after I got the tattoo. I met and married my ex-wife shortly after.” Shaw yawned and lay back on the mossy ground with his hands behind his head. He was incredibly relaxed given the situation. Come to think of it, I wasn’t opposed to a nap myself. That was odd. I rarely have the urge to sleep when I’m being held prisoner.
I lay back next to Shaw and cuddled against his side. He was warm and firm and he smelled of flesh and aftershave. He curled his arm around me, encouraging me to rest my head on his shoulder. I let out a long sigh and felt my eyelids droop.
“Why did you get divorced?” I spoke more to keep myself awake rather out of curiosity. Divorce is boring because the reasons for it usually boil down to the fact that the couple wasn’t compatible in the first place and unwilling to compromise.
“Enid didn’t like being a cop’s wife. She said it was too lonely and stressful, so she had an affair with my cousin. They got married last month.” Most men would be pissed over a family member poaching his wife, but he didn’t sound angry at all. It made me think that his marriage had been dead and buried long before they split up.
“What does your cousin do for a living?” I cuddled closer and put one arm across his chest. He felt good under my hand.
“He’s a Revenuer up in White County,” Shaw chuckled. “Apparently Enid doesn’t think that tramping through the forest searching for illegal liquor stills and getting shot at by moonshiners is as dangerous and stressful as being a city cop.”
I chuckled at that, thinking that Enid was a shallow social climber with a thing for law enforcement. The only difference between Shaw and his cousin was that the other guy was federal, and Shaw was local. It wasn’t that she hated being a cop’s wife; she wanted more prestige than what was afforded to city officers. What a bitch.
Under my cheek, I felt Shaw’s chest begin the slow rise and fall of deep sleep. I wanted to shake him awake, but I felt so heavy and tired that I couldn’t summon the energy to do it. I fought the fatigue at first, thinking that there was something important about sleeping inside the Fey Mounds that I should remember. Try as I might, I could not make the thought coherent and I fell under the wash of slumber and drifted into a dreamless sleep.

Chapter 16

I was shaken hard enough to rattle my teeth and pull me from the heavy sleep I had been buried in. I groaned and bitched incoherently as I fought to return to my comfortable slumber and was seized by my arms and hauled to my uncooperative feet. Even my eyeballs protested awareness and refused to look forward as I peeled my lids back and scowled into a face that was too beautiful to be human. He laughed at me, displaying pitch and tone never uttered from a mortal throat, and caught me when I tried to fall over. He spoke that weird language I’d heard from Bres when he was angry, and for a moment I thought I was about to be impaled on the pretty sword I saw poking over the man’s shoulder.
Another pair of these beauties, one a redhead and the other crowned with long silver tresses, stood on either side of me and gripped my arms to hold me up. A few feet away, Shaw wasn’t faring any better. Two more men were grunting and cursing as they pulled him from the ground and tried to get him to stand. Unfortunately, Shaw is much bigger and bulkier than the men trying to get him to move, and they ended up dropping him on his face. He came back up on his own, his eyes wide with shock and rubbing at his injured nose. The man all laughed at him as they took him gently by his arms and steered him out of the little circle of light.
I quickly came to my full senses once they got me moving. Not that there was anything to pay attention to. The chill darkness had enveloped us like cold water, hiding the sights and sounds of everything around us. Even our faerie escorts were lost to me, only their firm grips on my arms to let me know that they were still there. They laughed and joked among themselves, unconcerned with the strangeness of the environment as they pushed us into the cloaking darkness.
Suddenly denied my senses of sight and sound, I fought the urge to panic until I was certain that I was about to lose my mind. Then the darkness thinned and a large structure emerged to give my frantic brain something to focus on beside my growing terror. It was a massive hall, built from unfitted stone and held together with black sod and grass. It was a lovely example of Stone Age architecture, though its height and sprawl defied the tales that spoke of faerie mounds existing underground. I looked up and up and saw the tall, glittering spire that stood proudly over the hall’s entrance, but I did not see the roof of the Mound itself. Instead there was only the bright light of morning fog resting upon the top of the building and the surrounding trees that embraced it.
“Welcome to Sidhe Knockma,” said the leading guard as he opened a massive door of red yew carved with lithe figures and ivy leaves. We were herded over the threshold to walk across a smooth, warm, black floor that was polished until it gleamed like glass. Before us was an enormous chamber with walls so distant that I could not make them out with long, colorful banners hanging from the high ceiling. In the shadows above the broad strips of cloth were tiny colored lights like little stars in a twilight sky. They zoomed and danced in the floating darkness, sending sparks of glittering energy floating down onto the heads below. The taller, more powerful Fey were gathered in a group at the center of the chamber, their grace and beauty marked by the shift of their colorful gowns and sparkling jewels.
The guards steered us around the edge of the crowd to a tall throne set on a stone platform. A blonde man draped his long frame across the large seat like a model awaiting the arrival of a roaming photographer. He was dressed in rich green and blue with a thin circlet of gold and polished emeralds resting upon his arched brow, marking his position in this place. His large green eyes were full of peaceful mirth as he gazed upon the movements of his court then they settled upon the guards leading us up to him. I make it a policy to appear fearless, otherwise my enemies could use it against me whenever they liked. So I met the King’s gaze with a haughty lift of my chin and all but dared him to take offense. The King must have seen something in me, because his eyes widened with surprise and he straightened in his seat. The court sensed his movement and they turned as one to Shaw and I, raking us both with harsh and hostile stares.
“King Finvarra!” called a pompous fellow dressed in scarlet trimmed heavily in some kind of thick, brown fur. He yammered his protest while making sweeping gestures to another man in a white, blousy shirt and green trousers. That guy rolled his eyes at whatever the other was complaining of and rudely snorted a contemptuous remark that sent the first into a violent snit. The people laughed and cheered as the red fellow leaped upon the blousy shirt with a vicious snarl. He pummeled him about the head and shoulders while he raged and spat.
Amused by the fight, Finvarra let it go on for a few minutes before he called the guard to separate the fighters. As the pair was dragged off to cool down, the King called out to the court. “As a courtesy to our guests, we will speak the mortal tongue so that they may know what occurs here.” Finvarra gestured to us, and again the court treated us to expressions of contempt.
Beside me, Shaw let out an irritable sigh, a reaction I hadn’t expected from him. I had thought that a mortal with no previous experience with the supernatural beyond bedtime stories would, at the very least, be frightened half out of his wits and trying to convince himself that he was in need of heavy medication. Instead, he was regarding the court with a stoic cop’s face, as if he had seen all of this before and was already bored with it. It made me wonder if he’d lost his mind or perhaps he was that intellectually flexible.
Suddenly, the crowd shifted as people picked one side or the other of the platform. They left a long isle open between the groups and stared expectantly toward the opposite end of the hall. Finvarra called for the next complaint to come forward and slumped back into boredom. One of the guards standing with us said something in a snarky tone, to which his fellows gave him good hearted jabs in his ribs and laughed at him.
Long minutes passed while the two groups stared at each other in open hostility, until finally a man and a woman appeared, walking side by side but as far away from each other as the aisle would allow. Behind them, their entourages walked in single file and exchanged rude gestures with one another. The air grew colder at their arrival until even the warm floor seemed to chill the bottoms of my feet. The little lights that had been so excited before were slowing their activity to drift down closer to the crowd. I studied them curiously and realized that they were actually tiny people with gossamer wings sprouting from their backs.
“I’ll be damned,” Shaw whispered beside me. “Those are pixies. I didn’t think they were allowed to enter the Seelie High Court.”
“Huh?” The stories of the faerie have always been as diverse and confusing as any fantasy spun by drunken Irishmen. And in the tradition of such tales, they were wildly convoluted and contradictory. I had never